


Questions

by uminoko



Category: Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-18
Updated: 2012-11-18
Packaged: 2017-11-18 23:58:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/566757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uminoko/pseuds/uminoko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce babysits Jen.  Jen makes important inquiries, but not the most important ones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Questions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vanessasketch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanessasketch/gifts).



There were two things that six-year-old Jennifer Walters knew for sure: that her parents loved her, and that her cousin was the smartest person in the world.

Jen always asked a lot of questions, which served her very well in her future, yet-unknown profession, and, she suspected, made her parents proud on one hand, and wish she would go away on the other. Bruce never made her feel like he wished she’d just go away. Not only did he put up with her, but also—also, he went along with her more…hard-to-explain-to-parents ideas, which Bruce said were called “questionable,” such as shaving the dog (Lucy looked like she was hot), or seeing if they could climb out of the bedroom window onto the roof (they could), or dying Jen’s hair (it ended up green for some reason).

One thing Jen would never ask was why her parents ever left her and Bruce alone in the same room.

Like now, for example. Sure, Bruce is reading, but it’s something boring, so it’s only a matter of time before she comes up with a Questionable Idea. Jen tries to be interested in his stuff, she really does, and it makes sense when he explains it, but the things he reads out loud from the books Uncle Brian gives him just sound made up, with all the strings and boozons. Now, the books about hobbits or wardrobes are true. She especially likes the wardrobes, and makes Bruce climb into them with her, so they can wait in the darkness that smells like her mom’s perfume for a portal to open up.

“Hey, Bruce.”

He looks up over the glasses that make him look like a bug, or an alien pilot. ”Hey, Jen.”

“What’s…” she climbs over to his side of the couch and presses her nose up to his book. ”…The-ory of Relatives?”

“Relativity,” Bruce looks up at the ceiling. ”There are two. You wanna hear a special one?”

Jen nods, moving her nose up and down on his book. It smells musty.

“OK, so suppose you’re in space.”

This gets an even more emphatic nod. They are in familiar territory—Jen and Bruce suppose they are in space all the time, and there are usually aliens and lasers.

“How do you know if you’re moving?”

Jen thinks about this; she thinks very hard. ”You…flap your arms?”

Bruce shakes his head. ”You need to look at something else to know if you’re moving. Like, if you’re in a car going to my house, and you see the fences and the shrubs and the trees go by—that’s how you know the car is moving relative to them. But you’re not actually moving relative to the car.”

She considers this. ”Hey, Bruce.”

“Hey, Jen.”

“Why do we have butts?”

For a moment, Bruce reflects on the question. ”To…sit on them?”

“But whyyyyyyyy?” she stretches her arms out to him in utter frustration.

The boy takes his glasses off and starts wiping them on his shirt, a genuinely puzzled look on his face. ”Ummm…errr…Fat deposits? Ummm.”

That was OK, Jen decides. There were some things that even her cousin doesn’t know yet, but everyone says he is going to grow up to be a great scientist, and then he is going to know everything, and then he would address this vexing matter of butts. When Jennifer grows up, she is going to be the first fashion designer President of the United States, who is secretly Captain America. If that doesn’t work out, she is going to be a sheriff like her dad, because they protect people and have a shiny badge.

“OK,” she says. ”You’re orcs.”

Bruce screws up his face in an exaggerated snarl. ”You will never take this couch, armies of Gondor!”

Jen tries to look as heroic as possible and launches herself at her cousin.

He was always the orcs, and she almost never actually managed to push him off the couch, but when they compared bruises afterwards, he always had more bruises than she did, somehow.


End file.
